Spectacle, Surveillance, and Ethical Care
In an age of spectacle and surveillance, opacity may sound like evasion. We live under constant visibility—social media demands personal exhibition, and state and corporate systems mine our data for profit. In such a world of extraction, saying no to exposure becomes a radical act of ethical care. Opacity, as discussed here, is not about hiding wrongdoing or shirking accountability; it is about preserving human interiority and dignity in the face of forces that would turn every secret, sorrow, or story into consumable content. This chapter argues that cultivating opacity is a form of public discipline and political practice—a careful posture of refusal that resists the pull of voyeurism and exploitation, while remaining attentive to context and justice. Opacity is not mere silence or withdrawal; it is a deliberate ethic of refusal to be fully known on exploitative terms, grounded in a care for the self and others. Crucially, it protects the vulnerable without shielding abuse by the powerful. In what follows, we reframe opacity as an ethical stance, drawing on a chorus of voices—Édouard Glissant, James Baldwin, Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Achille Mbembe, María Lugones, and Donna Haraway—to build a scaffolding for “ethical opacity.” This will lay the groundwork for a theory that later chapters will apply to the design of AI and digital systems. The tone here is both precise and accessible: we seek clarity even as we embrace the rich complexity that opacity entails.
The Right to Opacity: Difference Without Domination
Édouard Glissant, the Martinican poet-philosopher, provides a foundational insight with his call for le droit à l’opacité—“the right to opacity”[1]. Speaking from the postcolonial context of the Caribbean, Glissant demanded the right not to be fully understood by the dominant culture, insisting “We demand the right to opacity”[2]. This is a right to complexity, to difference that does not need to be made transparent or flattened into someone else’s terms. Importantly, Glissant stressed that opacity is not confinement or isolation; rather, “Let it be a celebration”[3]. In other words, opacity is a positive condition of relation—it allows people to encounter each other without the compulsion to reduce the other to an object of knowledge. It is an invitation to genuine diversity, where we accept that we cannot completely know or categorize one another, and that this not-knowing is in fact essential to respect and solidarity.
Glissant’s idea links politics with ethics. He suggests that demanding opacity is both a political claim (a right) and an ethical stance (a duty). If individuals and cultures have a right to opacity, then others have a corresponding duty not to violate or override that opacity[4]. As the Critical Legal Thinking summary of Glissant puts it, he connects “legible rights claims (politics) and the refusal to comprehend and control others (ethics)”[4]. In practical terms, this means the majority or those in power are obliged to restrain their impulse to fully know, define, and manage the minority or the Other. Opacity thus becomes an ethic of non-intrusion, a check on the aggressive curiosity that often accompanies imperial or voyeuristic attitudes. It does not mean people retreat into total secrecy or cease communicating; rather, it demands communication without complete translation, relation without reduction.
By championing opacity, Glissant also reframes what freedom looks like in public life. Freedom is not achieved by rendering everyone transparent to each other or to the state (that path, history shows, often leads to new domination). Instead, freedom involves a mutual agreement to respect the irreducible depth of persons and cultures. This stance is deeply ethical: it cares for the integrity of the other’s selfhood. In a world long conditioned to see understanding as the prerequisite for respect (“I must know you in order to value you”), Glissant boldly inverts the formula: we can and should value one another’s difference without needing to grasp it fully. In fact, insisting on total comprehension can be a mode of control. As he warns, Western imperialism has often operated by trying to comprehend (in the double sense of understand and seize) every other culture[5]. The right to opacity resists this by saying some things are not meant to be understood by you—and that’s okay. This principle will be vital as we consider technology and AI: it urges us to design systems that permit opacity, that allow people to remain partially unreadable, instead of demanding total transparency.
Refusing the Spectacle: Between Witness and Voyeur
Opacity as an ethic gains urgency in light of Saidiya Hartman’s critique of the spectacle of suffering. Hartman, in Scenes of Subjection, examines the 19th-century accounts of slavery and argues that the display of enslaved people’s pain—however well-intentioned (e.g. to inspire abolitionist sympathy)—often turned into a perverse theater. She opens her book by asking: Are we witnesses who confirm the truth of suffering, or voyeurs “fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and sufferance?”[6]. This pointed question gets to the heart of the issue: when the pain of marginalized people is put on public display, does it provoke genuine empathy and justice, or does it become another consumable image that titillates the onlooker and reinforces the power of the spectator? Hartman is deeply wary of how easily empathy slides into a kind of narcissistic self-reflection for the spectator. “What does the exposure of the violated body yield?” she asks—proof of the victim’s humanity, or just an opportunity for the (privileged) viewer to feel emotions?[6]. The line between compassionate witness and voyeur is perilously thin[7]. Too often, images of Black suffering have elicited momentary outrage or pity, but no structural change—worse, they reinscribe Black people in the public imagination primarily as victims, perpetually violable and only legible through pain.
In this context, opacity can be a form of protection against the spectacle. To refuse to parade one’s pain for public consumption is an act of dignity. James Baldwin exemplified this refusal. As a Black gay man and towering writer in mid-20th-century America, Baldwin resisted the role of “professional sufferer” that white liberal audiences at times unconsciously wanted him to play. He did not hide the realities of racism—far from it, he articulated them with searing honesty—but he refused to perform grief or rage on demand to satisfy a voyeuristic appetite for Black agony. Baldwin’s stance was that his interior life, and Black interiority broadly, was not a spectacle for validation of white innocence or liberal sentiment. In The Fire Next Time and other essays, he challenges the reader to look at themselves—particularly the white reader—rather than scrutinize Black life for consolation or entertainment. This is a Baldwinian opacity: he shares incisive insight, but withholds the surrender of his selfhood to an audience that might consume it without truly changing. It’s an insistence that “I am not here to titillate your conscience by bleeding on stage.” Such a posture forces the public to confront their own responsibility. Baldwin knew, as Hartman later theorized, that too much exposure of Black suffering could paradoxically numb or distort the moral response. His refusals, then, were an ethical check on a society all too eager to ask the oppressed to perform their pain for an apathetic crowd.
Hartman’s critique and Baldwin’s example together illuminate why opacity is a public discipline. In a culture that thrives on revelation—tell your trauma, show your scars, share your truth on a viral video—choosing carefully what to withhold is a discipline of self-care and political strategy. It protects one’s interiority from becoming a mere site of spectacle. It also intervenes in the “libidinal economy” of race that Hartman describes, wherein Black suffering circulates as a currency for others’ moral or emotional profit[8]. To practice opacity here is to say: my suffering is not for sale. This does not mean silence in the face of injustice; rather it means that the marginalized subject will not authenticate their oppression by constantly exhibiting wounds for an external gaze. There are other ways to testify and to fight for change—ways that do not strip one’s privacy or reduce one’s identity to victimhood.
Ethical opacity, then, involves discerning the difference between necessary transparency and coerced exhibition. It asks: must the oppressed bare all to be believed? Hartman suggests not. In fact, she shows that even the most graphic revelations can fail to produce justice, and may even underwrite new forms of domination[9] (consider how contemporary social media endlessly loops videos of racial violence; the visibility is high, yet the violations persist). By contrast, a strategic opacity might mean sharing enough truth to mobilize action, but withholding the intimate core that spectacle would only exploit. It’s a fine line to walk, and a context-sensitive one—public advocates might at times decide to “show the receipts” of injustice (for example, activists releasing videos of police brutality), but even then, an ethics of opacity would caution how and for whom such images are circulated, ever mindful of the difference between galvanizing witnesses and feeding voyeurs. In sum, refusing the spectacle is about reclaiming ownership of one’s narrative and one’s body, maintaining that some part of the self will always lie beyond the colonizing gaze of the camera or the crowd.
Living in the Weather: Pervasive Exposure and Slow Death
If Hartman and Baldwin attune us to the personal and cultural stakes of opacity, Christina Sharpe and Achille Mbembe broaden the lens to structural and systemic dimensions. Sharpe’s notion of “the weather” describes the total, seemingly inescapable climate of anti-Blackness. In In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Sharpe argues that Black people live in a kind of permanent weather system—an atmosphere—of racism. “In my text, the weather is the totality of our environments… and that climate is anti-black,” she writes[10]. This “weather” is not something any individual can opt out of; it is like the air itself, an ambient condition that shapes life chances and quotidian experiences. Under such weather, one is always already visible in a certain way—visible as Black, therefore seen (by the racist gaze) as threat, as expendable, as target. The weather of anti-Blackness means that even mundane actions (walking, sleeping, driving) can become fatal if you are Black and thus hyper-visible to policing or public scrutiny. In other words, the problem is not individual visibility per se but a systemic illumination that exposes Black people to harm regardless of what they do. Sharpe’s formulation pushes us to see how calls for transparency or openness operate differently depending on positionality: for some, “openness” means opportunity; for others, it is akin to standing naked in a storm.
Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics complements this by describing how power in the modern world often works through the control of exposure to death. Necropolitics is the use of social and political power to dictate who may live and who must die, creating what Mbembe calls “deathworlds” in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life that are like a living death[11]. Crucially, racism is a prime driver of necropolitical logic[12]. Certain groups (often racialized, colonized, poor) are rendered killable or allowed to die through systemic neglect; they exist under a permanent threat, a kind of death-haunted existence. One might think of militarized border zones, prisons, occupied territories, or indeed disadvantaged Black neighborhoods under aggressive policing as examples of “deathworlds.” In these spaces, visibility can be lethal. To be seen by the wrong person (a soldier at a checkpoint, a police officer, a surveillance camera that flags you) can seal one’s fate. Mbembe highlights that necropolitics is not just the power to kill directly but also the power to expose people to death[13]—to force them into deadly circumstances or “habituate” them to the constant risk of demise[12].
Under the shadow of the weather and within the circuitry of necropolitics, opacity emerges as a survival strategy. When simply existing in public while Black can attract fatal violence, the impulse to become less visible, to hide or obscure oneself, is not cowardice but commonsense. Enslaved people understood this well when they fled via the Underground Railroad under cover of night, or when they used subtle codes in songs and stories to communicate secretly. Opacity in such contexts might mean camouflage, dissemblance, code-switching—a way of being present yet not wholly legible to those who may do harm. Sharpe’s “weather” metaphor even suggests that one must sometimes seek shelter or create microclimates of relief. For example, Black communities historically have carved out spaces—churches, jazz clubs, salons, barbershops—where they can breathe freely outside the immediate glare of the white gaze. These can be seen as zones of opacity: internally vibrant and seen by insiders, but shielded in important ways from outside scrutiny, or at least not arranged for outside consumption.
However, ethical opacity in the face of pervasive exposure is not simply about physical hiding. It can also mean psychological and cultural opacity: holding on to ways of knowing and being that outsiders cannot fully appropriate. This resonates with what the scholar and poet Harryette Mullen called the “transgressive clarity” of Black culture—appearing clear to those within it, but remaining opaque to those outside. It’s a way to thrive under the weather: by generating an internal light that doesn’t broadcast itself in terms the dominant system can exploit.
Still, a balance must be struck. Opacity should not translate into invisibility when injustice needs confronting. Sharpe’s work, for instance, doesn’t advocate that Black people simply disappear from the streets or cower indoors. Rather, it calls attention to the fact that the very terms of visibility are skewed; changing that requires political action. In necropolitical conditions, the powerful would prefer the oppressed to be either hyper-visible as targets or utterly invisible as non-entities. Ethical opacity refuses this false choice. It asserts: We will be present, but on our own terms. The practical politics here might involve, say, activism that uses anonymity or collective presence (the power of the crowd) to counteract the singling-out of individuals. It might involve self-care practices that are deliberately kept off surveillance networks. In short, for communities subjected to the weather of anti-Blackness or other forms of systemic violence, opacity is a way to reclaim safety and autonomy: to choose when and how to be seen.
Resistant Worlds: Creating Spaces of Opacity
Opacity is not only defensive; it can be generative. María Lugones, a decolonial feminist theorist, introduces the idea of “resistant worlds of sense” that oppressed people inhabit and create. These worlds are not literal separate planets, but rather subaltern social spaces with their own norms, logics, and ways of being. They often exist within and alongside the dominant world, yet are not fully legible to it. Lugones describes how such worlds are fashioned in the very encounter between oppression and resistance[14]. In her words, “ongoing crossings between multiple resistant worlds of sense are sometimes tentatively, sometimes powerfully enacted” in the tense contact with dominant sense[15]. Each of these worlds of sense is “a tense confluence of multiple local and translocal histories of meaning”[16]. This beautiful phrasing suggests that oppressed communities draw on shared histories and experiences (local ones and those that span distances and times) to create rich tapestries of meaning that outsiders can’t just decode at a glance.
Think, for example, of the inner-city ballroom culture that queer and trans people of color built in 1980s New York (famously depicted in Paris Is Burning). It was a vibrant world with its own language (houses, voguing, shade, realness) and values, born out of resisting a homophobic and racist mainstream. To the dominant culture, it was opaque—misunderstood or not seen at all—but internally it was a space of life, joy, and survival. Or consider how enslaved Africans in the Americas combined multiple traditions to forge spiritual practices (like Vodou or Santería) that had to be kept opaque to slaveowners who would persecute them; these practices were resistant worlds of sense, sustaining community and hope under domination. Lugones would remind us that these worlds are not pure enclaves sealed off from power—they exist in that “tense confluence” with oppression[16]. Dominant society often tries to penetrate or destroy them, yet something always remains untranslated, protected by opacity.
Opacity here operates as a collective practice. It’s not just an individual deciding to be private, but a community nurturing a shared obscurity that is also a shared intimacy. Lugones talks about the practice of “hanging out” as a way marginalized people inhabit social space differently—an unscripted, fluid occupying of space that defies the strict enclosures of public and private set by dominant norms[17][18]. In these hangouts, people develop “enigmatic vocabularies and gestures”[19], as Lugones says, that subvert the surveilling eye of power. The street corner, the kitchen table, the online forum with a pseudonymous group—these can be sites of what she calls “contestatory retreats”[20] where alternative sense is made. Such retreats are not escapes from reality, but rehearsals for a different reality under the nose of the oppressor.
By foregrounding resistant worlds, we see that opacity is not only a shield but also a seedbed. It allows new cultural forms, identities, and solidarities to grow beyond the grasp of those who would exploit or invalidate them. Importantly, these worlds are relational. Lugones notes that sometimes different resistant worlds come into contact and even collaborate in resistance[21]. This is key: opacity does not mean absolute separation or inability to coalize. On the contrary, because each world of sense is complex and multifaceted, they often find points of connection with other subaltern worlds. For example, the shared experience of marginalization can enable, say, Indigenous activists and Black activists to find common cause without needing to erase the opacity of their distinct histories. They don’t have to fully comprehend each other’s cosmologies to work in solidarity; a respectful opacity can coexist with alliance.
In public life, then, we might envision opacity-as-solidarity. Rather than the traditional model of unity which demands a single transparent agenda or identity, coalitions of the oppressed might function more like a patchwork: different fabrics, opaque to each other in places, yet stitched together by mutual respect and shared struggle. Lugones’ resistant worlds give us a glimpse of that patchwork in action. They suggest that maintaining some opacity—even among allies—can be healthy, allowing each group its space of self-definition and creativity, while still engaging in dialogue at the boundaries of these worlds. Such dialogue must be marked by a willingness to accept opacity, not as ignorance but as integrity. I don’t fully know your world, you don’t fully know mine, but we can learn from each other without needing to become identical or completely transparent.
For Lugones, this is tied to a decolonial feminist vision where the goal is not to assimilate into the dominant “commonsense” but to overturn it, to replace the master’s sense with a pluriverse of senses. Opacity is indispensable here: the master’s gaze cannot penetrate these pluriversal worlds without relinquishing its mastery. Resistant worlds thrive on an opacity that confounds the logics of purity and hierarchy (notice Lugones explicitly rejects myths of “territorial enclosures and purities of peoples”[22]). By practicing opacity, marginalized communities ensure they are not wholly consumed by the dominant narratives; they keep something in reserve, something that powers their resilience and defiance.
Informatics of Domination: The Push for Total Transparency
If resistant worlds show opacity’s liberatory potential, Donna Haraway’s concept of the informatics of domination reminds us of the forces arrayed against opacity in our contemporary high-tech society. In her “Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway analyzes how late 20th-century capitalism, coupled with burgeoning information technologies, has reshaped power dynamics. She describes a shift from old hierarchical forms of domination (think rigid class strata, traditional patriarchy, colonial bureaucracy) to new, networked forms of control—a web of informatics that infiltrates every aspect of life[23][24]. Under the informatics of domination, boundaries blur between human and machine, public and private, even between life and information. Haraway illustrates this with a striking observation: “No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed”[25]. In other words, nothing is opaque by default—given enough data, enough surveillance, every person’s body and behavior can be translated into information, linked into the system.
We see Haraway’s diagnosis all around us. The rise of Big Data, the ubiquity of social media, biometric surveillance, and now artificial intelligence feeding on massive datasets—all reflect a drive toward total transparency and interconnectivity. The new norm preaches that everything must be made legible to algorithms and institutions. Your smartphone tracks your steps, heart rate, and location; your conversations are mined for ad targeting; your face becomes unlock code and public ID. While this informatics age promises convenience and “optimization,” Haraway alerts us that it comes with a scary flipside: the erosion of any uncharted interior. The self can become a series of data points, ready to be recombined and exploited. Indeed, Haraway notes that under these conditions, even concepts like integrity or depth give way to “decision procedures and expert systems” as arbiters of truth[26]. Qualities that once were thought inherent or private (health, identity, preferences) are now variables in someone’s formula.
In such a context, the ethic of opacity faces new challenges. The informatics of domination does not tolerate the unknown; what cannot be captured is often ignored or, worse, deemed suspicious. Consider predictive policing algorithms: if a neighborhood is a blind spot (no cameras, no digital records), authorities might treat it as a danger zone precisely because it’s not transparent to their systems. Or think about social pressure: if you’re not on social media sharing your life, some might view you as antisocial or hiding something. The cultural logic of our time equates participation with visibility. Haraway’s insight helps us see that this is not a neutral trend—it’s part of a power apparatus that wants to interface every aspect of existence, to assimilate it into a common code (usually one that serves capital or the state).
Yet Haraway also offers hope in her cyborg metaphor. The cyborg, a blend of organism and machine, is her way of saying we are already enmeshed in these systems, but that doesn’t mean we are powerless. Resistance in the informatics age might involve subverting the codes, introducing noise, or creating new codes that the dominant system can’t read. In terms of opacity: it might mean reclaiming spaces of illegibility. For instance, encryption technologies can provide some sanctuary for privacy; whistleblowers and hackers might disrupt data flows to protect the public; artists might flood networks with disinformation or satire that confound surveillance (a kind of deliberate opacity by obfuscation). Haraway herself suggests that rather than longing for the old “natural” order (which had its own dominations), we should seize the possibilities in the new—using the “scary new networks” in unexpected ways[27]. This could include, for example, communities controlling their own data and deciding collectively what remains opaque and what is shared.
One potent example is the movement for data sovereignty among Indigenous groups and others: an effort to keep certain cultural knowledge and genetic data out of the hands of corporations and research institutions that might exploit them. This aligns perfectly with Glissant’s right to opacity in the digital realm. In fact, bringing Glissant into dialogue with Haraway, we might say: in a world of omnivorous informatics, we demand the right to opacity in code. Our algorithms, our AI, should have ethics built in that respect the unquantifiable. They should acknowledge limits—some dimensions of human life should not be fed into the data stream.
Haraway’s informatics of domination also underscores a political paradox: while everyday people are pushed to be transparent (share more, live publicly, yield data), the powerful often shroud themselves in secrecy (from proprietary algorithms and trade secrets to government classified programs). Ethical opacity as a political practice must tackle this asymmetry. The goal is not simply more opacity for everyone; rather, it is a recalibration: privacy and opacity for the vulnerable and the individual, transparency and accountability for institutions of power. The informatics regime currently inverts this: citizens are naked, corporations are opaque. An ethics of opacity insists on flipping it to a just balance. We want a society where your personal life isn’t an open book for advertisers or officials, but the algorithms that decide public life are open to scrutiny. In short, Haraway helps us see that designing a future that honors opacity will require not just personal choices but systemic overhaul—especially as we move into an era of AI governance.
Toward a Theory of Ethical Opacity
Bringing these threads together, we arrive at a conception of ethical opacity suited for our times. Ethical opacity is a practiced stance of selective transparency—a posture of openness or hiddenness calibrated to context, power, and care. It recognizes that vulnerability is unevenly distributed: those already subject to prejudice, surveillance, or violence need the shield of opacity more than those whom society protects by default. It also recognizes that power operates in the dark: corruption and abuse thrive in secrecy, and thus radical opacity for the already powerful can enable harm. Ethical opacity therefore discriminates whose opacity serves justice and whose opacity serves injustice.
At heart, ethical opacity is about preserving human interiority. It affirms that each person has a depth—of thoughts, emotions, identities, relationships—that should not be involuntarily strip-mined by social or technological forces. In a world of reality TV confessions and predictive analytics, maintaining a private self becomes a discipline. This might mean simply the resolve not to post one’s every thought online, or the courage to say “that’s not your business” when pressed for personal data. It could also mean community agreements about what stories and images are shared with the wider public. For instance, after incidents of communal trauma, some communities choose not to circulate images of victims, to avoid re-victimization through gawking. Such choices exemplify ethical opacity: they prioritize human dignity over the public’s curiosity.
However, ethical opacity is not absolutist. It is not a blanket of silence that covers wrongdoing. Rather, it operates as a kind of ethical filter or valve. Consider how, in movements for social justice, survivors of abuse often speak out publicly to hold perpetrators accountable—that is a strategic transparency that challenges power. But those same survivors may withhold intimate details from the public, to avoid intrusive spectacle. The #MeToo movement had elements of both: revelations (ending the opacity that shielded harassers) and careful withholding (survivors deciding how much of their story to tell, refusing prurient demands for graphic detail). Ethical opacity guided those decisions, even if implicitly. It asks of any situation: Who benefits from this being known or unknown? If keeping a secret enables abuse, then opacity is not ethical. If exposing something violates a person’s sovereignty over their own life narrative, then perhaps that exposure is unethical.
One way to frame it is through the lens of consent and care. Ethical opacity aligns with consent: nothing about us without us. You disclose what you choose, when you choose, to whom you choose. If an authority attempts to force disclosure (of one’s identity, beliefs, associations) without just cause, they violate this ethic. Meanwhile, care comes in when we think of why opacity can be valuable: to care for someone is often to protect their vulnerabilities, not to parade them. A caregiver for a patient with trauma, for example, might shield that patient from having to explain their painful past to every new doctor or official—they act as a guardian of the patient’s opacity until trust is established. By contrast, a regime that subjects the patient to retelling their trauma to prove their need (for asylum, or for benefits) arguably lacks care; it treats transparency as more important than well-being.
We can now see how all the thinkers we engaged help scaffold this theory of ethical opacity:
- Glissant gives us the principle: a right to opacity for everyone, meaning no one should be forced into transparency to earn respect[1]. He also warns that we must actively claim and mobilize for this right[5]. Ethical opacity builds on this by operationalizing the right in everyday conduct and design of institutions.
- Baldwin and Hartman show the personal and cultural tactics of opacity. Baldwin’s refusal to perform suffering demonstrates dignity in withholding, while Hartman’s analysis reveals the stakes—how easily empathy can become exploitation[6]. They teach us that sometimes telling one’s truth in public is not liberating but limiting, if the terms of reception are skewed. Ethical opacity learns from them to prioritize self-definition over imposed definition.
- Sharpe and Mbembe underline why opacity can literally be life-saving. Under constant anti-Black “weather”[10], or in deathworlds where being seen by power can get you killed, opacity is a form of resistance and preservation. They push ethical opacity to incorporate a keen awareness of risk: it might be ethical, even obligatory, to hide people (in safe houses, through encryption, via anonymity) when exposure means violence. Think of activists in repressive regimes using pseudonyms online—that’s ethical opacity in action, serving the higher ethics of saving life and opposing tyranny.
- Lugones adds the dimension of creativity and community. Her resistant worlds show opacity as a space of play and construction of new meanings[14]. Ethical opacity thus is not only a shield but a workshop: behind the partially drawn curtain, marginalized folks can experiment with identity and strategy without the glare of the dominant culture’s judgment. This is crucial for innovation in resistance. Many social movements have an “underground” phase where ideas and plans are hashed out away from the surveillance of opponents. That opacity is what later allows a robust public emergence. Lugones reminds us that opacity can be joyful and relational, not lonely or isolating.
- Haraway finally brings in the technological and structural challenge. She alerts us that respecting opacity must contend with systems designed to eliminate it[25]. Thus, ethical opacity must be baked into our technological policies and designs. It is not enough for individuals to attempt privacy if the default of every platform is surveillance. Haraway’s world demands we collectively fight for infrastructural opacity: data encryption, limits on data collection, transparency (paradoxically) about how algorithms operate so that people can opt out or modify what is known about them. In Haraway’s spirit of the cyborg, ethical opacity might mean embracing certain tools (like VPNs, alternative networks, open-source software) that allow us to inhabit the networks of domination while subverting them.
To solidify the idea of ethical opacity, consider a scenario that ties to upcoming questions of AI design: imagine a city deploying AI-powered cameras in every public space to algorithmically detect “suspicious behavior.” The promise is safety through total visibility. An ethics of opacity would challenge this on multiple grounds. First, it asks: who is made vulnerable by this? Likely it’s marginalized groups who will be disproportionately labeled suspicious by biased algorithms. Their every movement becomes hyper-visible to scrutiny. Second, it considers: what interior human experiences are we sacrificing? Public anonymity—the ability to walk in a city without being identified or tracked—has long been a subtle freedom that allows people to explore, to be flâneurs, to assemble in protest. The AI cameras destroy that opacity of daily life. Ethical opacity would advocate for limits on such surveillance (perhaps no facial recognition, or no tracking of individuals’ long-term patterns), arguing that a city where everyone is watchfully transparent is not a city of liberty but a digital panopticon. Instead of assuming more surveillance equals more safety, an ethics of opacity invites design approaches that prioritize privacy while still addressing genuine problems. For instance, if the concern is crime, invest in community-based solutions and targeted, accountable policing, rather than blanketing everyone in a surveillance dragnet.
As we prepare to delve into AI design in subsequent chapters, the theory of ethical opacity we have built here will serve as a compass. We will be asking: how can we create technologies that honor the right to opacity? This could mean AI that doesn’t hoover up all available data, or interfaces that give users control over what aspects of themselves they reveal. Glissant’s provocative extension of opacity as a kind of asylum from the modern world’s onslaught is instructive: he mused that the right to opacity today might be akin to a right to asylum from “the companies and devices that try to seize our attention and leisure”[28]. In that spirit, ethical opacity in design would seek to give people refuge from constant extraction. A humane AI might be one that forgets data after serving a purpose, or one that deliberately includes randomness so as not to fully know a person’s next action (thus avoiding a perfect predictability that equates to no privacy).
To conclude, opacity as public discipline and political practice is about carving out breathing room in a world that wants to flood every nook of our lives with light. It is about strategic shadows: not darkness for its own sake, but shade that protects life, much like a tree’s shadow offers respite from an oppressive sun. The voices of Glissant, Baldwin, Hartman, Sharpe, Mbembe, Lugones, and Haraway harmonize in this idea. They urge us to rethink the equation of transparency with truth or goodness. Sometimes, opacity is the truth of freedom—the truth that we are not fully capturable. As we carry this forward, we will see that designing ethically opaqueward (to coin a term) might be one of the great challenges and necessities of the 21st century. It asks us to build a world where people can stand in the public square without feeling stripped bare, where our technologies respect the boundaries of the soul, and where opacity and illumination find a just balance in sustaining human dignity.
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [28] Édouard Glissant: The Right to Opacity
[6] [7] [8] [9] Bearing witness in a time of spectacle – Overland literary journal
[10] The Weather – The New Inquiry
[11] [12] [13] Necropolitics – Wikipedia
[14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] Lugones Maria Tactical Strategies of The Streetwalker Estrategias Tacticas de La Callejera 1 | PDF
[23] [24] [25] [26] [27] A Cyborg Manifesto – The Informatics of Domination | 26reads
Jonathan Johnson-Swagel 
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